Tessa's Recipe Rundown...

Taste: The warm autumn aromatic spices balance just perfectly with the slightly sweet pumpkin. Toss some chocolate in the mix and you have a totally craveable treat!Texture: Thanks to all my endless cookie experimenting, I’ve finally discovered *exactly* how to manipulate a cookie’s texture. These pumpkin cookies are soft yet chewy, with no cakey texture you typically find in pumpkin cookies. WOOHOO!!Appearance: Beautiful. I added a few chocolate chips on top of the cookies halfway through baking to make them picture-perfect.Ease: Super easy, but they do require a 30 minute chill so it’s a practice in patience.Pros: Easy, fun, and festive twist on cookies.Cons: Absolutely none.Would I make this again? Oh yes, again and again and again.

Every time I go to type the word pumpkin, I type “pumpking” instead. Every. single. time. Does anyone else do this or do my fingers have a mind of their own? If “pumpking” were a verb, I’m doing it right now by writing about these Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies. I am SO EXCITED to share this recipe with you guys.

It kind of makes me feel like the pumpqueen. Hm, that doesn’t really sound like a good thing – I take it back. How about cookie queen? I recently shared my Cookie Customization Guide to help customize all your cookie dreams, and to show you how to get exactly the texture you crave from your homemade cookies. I thought I’d use the guide myself to develop a perfectly chewy pumpkin chocolate chip cookie recipe.

(This post was originally published in 2014 and updated with new photos and metric measurements.)

And… I think I’ve accomplished it! These cookies are soft but chewy. They look like normal cookies, not like the puffy pieces of cake most pumpkin cookies look like. There’s a few tricks to getting these cookies chewy.

Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookie Recipe Notes

Bread Flour

Bread flour has more protein which allows the dough to form more strands of gluten. The end result? A chewier cookie. Seriously, use bread flour to make chewy cookies. If you don’t have bread flour, you can use all-purpose, but you won’t get the same chewy bite.

Egg yolk

Egg yolks also have protein, which adds a bit of chewiness to a cookie and helps increase spread (see my Ultimate Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies Part 2 for more). Since we’re adding pumpkin puree to the dough, we’re already adding a significant amount of moisture. In fact, pumpkin puree can be used as an egg replacer in baking. Because of that, I only added 1 egg yolk in this recipe, no whole eggs. Too much moisture would make these cakey.

Sugar

As seen here, more granulated sugar promotes spread, chewiness, and crunch. More brown sugar promotes thicker, softer cookies. So, I decided to use mostly granulated sugar in these Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies with just a touch of light brown sugar for that butterscotch flavor.

Melted Butter

Instead of creaming the butter and sugar together, this recipe simply calls for stirring melted butter and sugar together. As you can see in my Ultimate Guide to Chocolate Chip Cookies post, using melted butter helps the cookies spread more and develop sightly crisp edges. Perfect for when you want a more chewy and crisp cookie, which is what we want here.

Chilling

Since we’re using melted butter, the dough ends up being quite wet and warm. It needs to go in the fridge for 30 minutes, or until slightly firmed, before being shaped into balls and baking. You can store the dough in the fridge, covered, for up to 2 days.

Flatten

Once the dough is chilled and scooped into 2-tablespoon sized balls, flatten the balls with the palm of your hand. DO NOT SKIP THIS. This will seriously help the cookies spread and flatten as they bake, which will make them look and feel more chewy. If you forget, your cookies will be tall and thick and slightly more cakey.

Storage

These cookies keep for quite a while in an airtight container at room temperature, up to 5 days. You’ll notice that the pumpkin and spice flavor intensifies the longer they sit, so you may want to keep that in mind if you plan on serving these to your friends and family. If you’re anything like us, though, you definitely don’t have the patience to wait a day!

If you make these wonderful Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cookies, be sure to take a picture and tag it #handletheheat on Instagram. Seeing your photos makes my day!

Directions

In a small bowl whisk together flour, salt, baking soda, cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, and cloves.

In a large bowl combine melted butter, granulated sugar, and brown sugar with a rubber spatula. Add the egg yolk, and vanilla, stirring to combine. Stir in pumpkin puree until smooth. Add the flour mixture in 3 batches, mixing well after each addition, until a soft dough forms. Fold in chocolate chips.

Cover and chill the dough in the fridge for 30 minutes, or until firm enough to scoop. Using a spring-loaded ice cream scoop or a spoon, roll the dough into 2-tablespoon sized balls and place on the prepared baking sheets. *Flatten slightly with the palm of your hand.* Bake for 10-12 minutes, or until set and edges are lightly browned.

Let cool completely. Store at room temperature in an airtight container for up to 5 days. Pumpkin flavor will intensify after a day.

Course:
Dessert

Cuisine:
American

If you make this recipe, be sure to snap a picture and share it on Instagram with #handletheheat so we can all see!

Recipe byTessa

About Tessa...

I share trusted baking recipes your friends will LOVE alongside insights into the science of sweets. I'm a professionally trained chef, cookbook author, and cookie queen. I love to write about all things sweet, carb-y, and homemade. I live in Phoenix, Arizona (hence the blog name!)

new reader here. Just stumbling on your site – your cookies look beautiful. You may have mentioned this in a previous post but wanted to check what brand of chocolate chips you recommend. Also will you get the same consistency if you use fruit, like raisins or cranberries instead of choc. chips?

Welcome! I usually buy Nestle or Ghiradelli – whatever is available/on sale. As for other add-ins, you should be fine to add in whatever you’d like as long as it’s not much bigger than the size of a chocolate chip.

These look AMAZING! I don’t like cakey pumpkin cookies very much so have been wanting to try these. However, I don’t want to go to the store and was hoping to use pumpkin pie spice instead of all the individual spies. Any suggestion on how much? Thanks!

Hi Tessa! I love your blog! What would you say are the differences between this and your older “Chewy Pumpkin Choc. Chip” recipe? Is this an improved recipe, maybe? Trying to figure out which one to use 🙂

Tessa, just made a DOUBLE batch of the pump.-choc-chip- cookies for the first time and have already devoured four of them before they even had time to cool. (shame on me) Needless to say, this will be my new favorite cookie recipe. I was out of clove so I used a little bit of Chinese 5 Spice Powder instead——–wonderful flavor !!! Thank You for another yummy treat !! Sheila. Benicia, Calif.

I just made these this evening for a school bake sale. Thank you for the inspiration! Perfectly seasonal and very tasty. I definitely agree with refrigerating the dough- it makes for the perfect cookie.

I just think you should know I follow a lot of baking sites, and your photographs are far and beyond the most beautifully captured. The layout, light and overall look of your pictures are beyond gorgeous. Kudos to you.

Tessa, cookies are baking in the oven right now. I’m a bit worried, however. The dough seems more like cake better than cookie dough, though they did stay in the scooped shape. So, we will see. I fear I may have thought the scale read 195g when I measured the Bread Flour, but was actually 145g! Yikes. Two more minutes left on the timer so we shall see!

As expected, they came out awful. They were rubbery, and despite the length of time I baked them, were raw I the center. My son (9) was helping and he forgot to let the butter cool before mixing it with the sugar. Could this be what went wrong? This is my first baking fail, believe it or not, so I am now determined to do them again and do them right. What do you think went wrong?

so happy you shared this recipe that is so heavily researched and tested like so many others here, I love that these are tested in multiple batches and variations, thank you for making sure that they’re not “cakey”!

This is arguably the best recipe that crossovers between pumpkin and chocolate chips. The kids loved chocolate since they were inside me but now that with all that pumpkin pie spice, there’s a new flavor in town. And to keep up with that much pressure is something that becomes easy with recipes like this. I like how you have mentioned that the taste of pumpkin intensifies after a week because yes, It becomes stronger due to all that sweetness. Great recipe, and one that I am going to try before the Thanksgiving weekend.

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